Invitation to the Voyage
by Mebd
Summary: He mouths Thank you and giggles and says : "My love for you is terribly incestuous." that is what he says, he who has never been her brother again for thousands of years, he who never was her brother.


**Author's note :  
**

Partly inspired by Deirdre Laurin's short story _Près du Mu_r (Next to the Wall) in _De Brocéliande en Avalon, _an anthology of Arthurian short stories.

Partly inspired by Baudelaire's poem _Invitation au Voyage _in_ Les fleurs du mal (_Flowers of evi_l)_, whose first stanza is a little piece of fan-fiction in itself.

Post series. Partly based on the legends. Arthur and Morgana.

* * *

**Invitation to the Voyage**

1. He made his choice. He chose Guinevere. They said she was his true love and he let them take the decision for him. Guinevere was sweet and loving, he loved the way he reflected in her eyes. In her eyes, he was tall and strong, he was straight and dutiful. In her eyes, there was little he could not do and what he did was right.

He could marry her, he could live with her, he could love her and every voice that raised was cheerful and approving.

He gathered his courage and turn to look back at Morgana, one last time, and he found her gone. And he found her cold stinging absence creeping inside of him, gnawing him, making him sick to his stomach. So he tried and buried her deep down in him, but he had forgotten he would have to excavate the feel of her phantom fingers from his flesh. The lingering smell of her skin from his. He had forgotten he would have to resurrect the residual pieces of her she had strewed his whole being with before burying them.

And she was there again. In front of him. He had his Queen at his side and his entire kingdom at his feet and he had Morgana under his skin, pressing against his retina like the lover she once had been. And she watched him coldly, taunting, sneering, and she pierced right through him like she knew everything. He knew she did. For she was Morgana, effortlessly graceful, uncompromising, inhumanly beautiful, implacable, perfect and a witch, an enemy, a Seer, a sister, a lover. For she was Liberty. For she was his freedom, his dreams, his redemption.

Instantly he remembered why his love for Guinevere could be but shallow, almost forced like a burden or a duty. Although he was a man of duty, agreeing to what he ought to do.

While he could be fool, he could be insane in Morgana's eye. He could be an arrogant, insufferable, spoiled prince and he could be an inefficient, insecure child mourning his mother, craving to love and to be loved. He could fail and sin and fall. He could try to redeem in her just as he wanted to sink and sink deeper in the wrong way.

But he was to be King and he carried the heavy, indissoluble responsibility of his people and his lands. He had to marry Guinevere and with her by his side, he was able to remember why he should not follow Morgana.

Subliminal Morgana gently smiled, dancing away like a swaying acrobat, edging a crest.

* * *

2. He found her piercing gaze, decades later. And he slowly shook his head.

He had instantly recognized her figure, because she had never utterly left neither his retina nor her grave at the bottom of his heart, and through the years he had often felt like waking up the dead. Time could not age her no more than her magic could leave her. She was tall, slender, as dark as night and as ethereal as mist.

The veils from her white clothes flew high behind her and her fixed, glossy, black locks cascaded over her shoulders. Never had she been more beautiful. Never had she looked less human. Or less alive, as blood splashed over her, trickling down her frozen features and thin dress in long, blurry ribbons.

He looked down on himself, at his beard and hands and tunic equally splashed, as the point of his sword dropped heavily onto the bodies at his feet. And he thought : _what did they make out of us ?_ And his eyes found hers again, that she had widened then closed, that escaped some tears like promises _of pitfalls, mostly.

Suddenly it was like he had been holding his breath all his life which he had never realized until he released it. Then he lowered his gaze and dropped his sword and it wasn't until Mordred went to face him from his back that the sight of the blade piercing through his stomach sank in. He groped about his hips and stumbled over the fierce, proud adolescent who watched him with anger and dismay and padded his head with one hand while the other dug his dagger in his chest.

The boy gasped, clutching his fingers in Arthur's sticky shirt as Arthur pulled the dagger out and threw it away. He gently kissed his forehead as they both fell on their knees and kept breathing : _what did they make out of us ? _And then, as Mordred was sliding on his side and Arthur trying to support him to absorb his fall : _my boy, my poor boy_.

And all of a sudden, there was Morgana above them who stood against the white sky, her frail shoulders shaking and her pale hands like flying birds. She knelt beside them and bent over the shivering child, lulling him dead as he searched her eyes with undying love. Then she looked like she was never going to straighten again, like she was turning into a pillar of salt.

He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them again, his head was on her lap and her hair brushed tenderly against his chin and her tears crashed into his eyelids. Or were them his ?

He tried and told her how he had loved her till the end, from the start. How he had kept her hidden in him all his life, how he will bring her along in his death. How he could not die, for she was his breath, for she held his soul in her hands. How beautiful she had always been to him, how perfect, even now they were broken and sullied, how...

And he felt the thickness of his tongue, the drought of his lips and he knew he hadn't mouthed a single word. Waves of despair swept over him. This could not happen to him. Not after all they went through, not after all they sacrificed, not after their youths given to the world and their lives thrown in the wind...

She rocked back and forth and he finally understood what she was chanting.

"I know" she said "I know it all."

He wanted to catch her hand and she entwined her fingers with his. He remembered how she used to smell of herbs and flowers, something citric and homesick, as he took a deep breath. She always smelled like she ached to come back to where she belonged and that were not where he belonged. But Morgana was Freedom and she now smelled of rainy woods and spring nights and magic.

"My love for you will never end, Arthur."

He could not see her above him with her blood-stained lips, but he watched her swaying figure on her razor edge and he nodded.

"This will never stop, I swear."

He wanted to call her name and make her stop, but she danced ahead of him and the echoes of her giggles taunted him.

"We will meet again, Arthur, until we have our happy ending."

_Morgana, wait_.

"One day, I will freely love you and I will have the right to do it."

_Morgana_.

* * *

3. She laughed. And kissed his cold lips. And stroke his rigid cheek. And howled. Enough with fate. Enough with doom. Enough with death and property and duty. She rolled Arthur face down and drew the sword out of him in one fluid motion, before resting the back of his head on her lap again. She glanced at the lake and on the other side of it at Avalon in the mist.

"I just wanted to love him. Why could not we? Why can it never be me ?"

A raven answered distantly.

"No. We won't come back."

The air tensed around her. The raven croaked furiously, closer.

"No."

She sealed her promise on his lips.

"No." she repeated.

Then she put the sword against her temple and pull it down her crane. Soft locks rained soundlessly around his head before blowing with the wind.

* * *

4. They passed by each other in the crowded streets and they unconsciously slowed down. Then their eyes widened and they turned around, just a second too late. They'd been engulfed in the crowd and they didn't even know what they were looking for. Or who they expected. So they shrugged and went their way.

* * *

5. He found her some day but he recognized her the moment she released her last breath.

* * *

6. She could only see his profile as he stood three-quarters from her, but there was this spark crackling over his skin and this pulling deep down in her. Like the renewal of all their faulty acts, their serendipitous errors.

And she began to remember. And this could be the right time. At last. This could be the end of the doom. Our happy ending. She could already picture the tableau : she would march fiercely towards him, shining like a thousand suns with all the intensity of her memory and her love, and he would turn around in a slow awakening motion and he would beckon her out of their age-old solitude. He would take her hand or he would give her back her promise from his lips to hers, and they would age together, finally. Or they would let the grudge they born go and maybe...

Maybe find their home, in the land where she belonged.

Or maybe had she deceived herself. Maybe has it always been an illusion to prevent herself from this excruciating pain. Maybe were they actually doomed without any chance of redemption. Maybe was she never supposed to see her dreams and hopes fulfill, maybe was she never meant to reach the absolute.

Her memory may have come back but she was to remain an empty shell, a frightened little girl in an absurd and vain quest for something that did not even exist, that no one even promised her to find. And she was tired of all this. She was so tired in this life, so shallow, such a coward. She'd rather let this opportunity go than facing the truth or than snatching pieces of broken happiness from him.

After all, he hadn't spotted her.

"I am not so very brave." she whispered, and a part of her wished he heard her.

_Was it even to end some day ?_

"Close, but not quite."

She was demanding and implacable, and she wondered how many existences they will have to bear, looking for their soul in vain, and without even realizing it.

"I promised we would have it all. And we will."

She gently backed up, as she Guinevere wrapped her arm closer around his waist.

7. They meet by chance in a library. They have no idea why but they found themselves walking towards the other and they stand still and stare at each other for hours. And they bump into the other every day that follows.

They begin to play courtly love. They speak literary words, the echoes of them turning into their loving games, their gesture the most rapt with wonder. Their every gesture is rapt with wonder.

Their memories emerge from their every contact and they are happy, at last. Morgana knows Guinevere's shadow sometimes flies above them like a vulture, but she wants to think they reached their happiness nonetheless.

"How can you love me ?" He often asks. "Are you really sure you're not making any mistake ?"

"Of course I am. Don't have doubts about it.

"I don't. It may be the craziest thing about this. It's..."

"Obvious. And I love it that you are crazy."

"No one had ever seen my craziness. I am a man of duty, you know, even if..."

"I know. I wouldn't love you otherwise."

"And you are the only one who can make this duty fail, the only one who ever made it fail. I don't know what you are. You are all I want."

"It is not me. It's us. We can only be clear when together."

He has fiddled with the same book for a while now. _Flowers of evil_. He hasn't quite decided yet whether he will finally take hold of it or not.

But then he makes his mind up and turns back to her, holding the book, and his naked skin glows in the open fire light.

"I want you to read it for me. I used not to, because... because it'll be painful, but now I'd rather do so. It is page 184."

She has no idea what the text in this page could be. She is slightly apprehensive. Baudelaire wrote some really nasty things about her, about women who are not her anymore. And then she sees. And then he turns everything upside down, again, still.

"This poem is one of my favorites." she mutters, incapable of holding it. "Baudelaire's only poem I know by heart."

And her sentence gives sunshine back to him, again, still.

So she starts reading _Invitation to the Voyage, _her voice breaking with nothing she could do about it, like she had never read it before, like she will never read it again.

_My child, my sister,  
Think of the rapture  
Of living together there  
Of loving at will,  
Of loving till death,  
In the land that is like you... _

And they start talking to one another's soul their sweet native language, that even Merlin forgot. And his never treacherous eyes shine as the tears roll down their cheeks.

He mouths _Thank you_ and giggles and says : "My love for you is terribly incestuous." that is what he says, he who has never been her brother again for thousands of years, he who were never her brother.

And she suddenly know how foolish of her it was to think it could ever end. She can never be the wife, she can never be his home. She is Morgana, she is Liberty, she is the core of dreams. Their happiness can be but partial, their love stolen moments.

Avalon cursed them and she can feel the point of the blade right above their heads. She only postponed its fall.

But maybe now, in Arthur's tight embrace, in the dead of night, at the peak of their happiness, maybe could she go along with this.

Maybe was it time to come back to Avalon.

* * *

Mon enfant, ma soeur,  
Songe à la douceur  
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble  
Aimer à loisir,  
Aimer et mourir  
Au pays qui te ressemble...


End file.
